4.2 Spain: Philip II

Anguissola, Philip II, 1564

In 1556 Charles V retired from his monarchical burden and bestowed his Spanish possessions on his 29-year old son, Philip. History shows Philip to have been handsome and charming, serious and somber, highly educated and scholarly, industrious, extremely private, avid for detail, and a fanatical Roman Catholic. In his later years he would isolate himself in his office in the Escorial from which he could contemplate the palace’s chapel altar and be reminded of his commitment to his faith and its revitalization. During the course of his life Philip would be married four times: to Princess Mary of Portugal, Queen Mary of England, Princess Elizabeth (France), and Princess Anne (Austria), all of whom died of natural causes. Philip and his queens had several children. His eldest heir, Prince Carlos, was sickly and mentally unstable and was kept isolated. He would die in 1568. On Philip’s death in 1598, he was succeeded by his younger son, Philip III.

Philip’s possessions made him the most powerful monarch in Europe. They included Spain, the Netherlands, the Franche-Comté, Milan, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, a few cities along the North African Mediterranean coast, all of Spanish America (West Indies, Mexico, Central America, Peru) and the Philippines. In 1580 he inherited the crown of Portugal and all of its commercial empire in Brazil, Africa, the Middle East, India, and the East Indies. (Portugal reverted back to independent status in 1640.)

Philip’s Policies for Governing Spain

Philip’s governing of Spain had three major characteristics. Firstly, he believed his state’s well-being was dependent upon its spiritual unity. Fanatical in his faith, he authorized the Spanish Inquisition to enforce spiritual conformity to the Catholic Church. In this regard the militant Church court undertook a vigorous persecution of heresy with its victims being “Christianized” Jews (Marranos) and Muslims (Moriscos) suspected of having relapsed into their old faiths. Thousands were accused and compelled to recant their alleged heresies. A few were burned at the stake, others were condemned to serve the crown as galley slaves, but most were fined and, under promise of worse punishment, were restored to the Catholic faithful. Both the Marranos and Moriscos suffered under heavy taxes. Later, in 1568, when the Inquisition revived old laws forbidding the use of Arabic, the wearing Moorish clothing, and other traditional Moorish customs, the Moriscos rebelled. The rebellion lasted three years and was brutally suppressed by the King’s armies. Thousands were killed and the rest were expelled from their homes in Granada and scattered throughout Castile.

Secondly, Philip sought greater centralization of political power in the crown. He attempted to build royal absolutism by expanding the number of royal offices and councils responsible to the king. He personally paid such close attention to the details of supervising royal government that the operation of state power was slow and cumbersome. So slow was the pace of government (the king having to review every piece of state paper) that the expression originated “If death came from Spain, we’d live forever.”

The third feature of his governance was struggling with royal finances. The costs of the royal government were tremendous. In addition to governing Spain and its dominions, Philip had to finance an ambitious foreign policy intended to advance Spain’s interests regarding the Ottoman Turks, France, Italy, England, and the service of the Catholic Reformation.

On the surface, Spanish financial resources appeared limitless. Spain had control of all gold and silver mined in the Americas, one fifth of which went directly to the crown. Mercantilist regulations likewise directed Portuguese colonial wealth to Spain. Spain exported merino wool, silk, grain, wines, olives, and oranges. Still, revenues were not enough to meet expenses. So why was there not enough money? The Catholic Church, a wealthy institution in its own right, owned large areas of land that were exempted from taxation. Wealthy Castilian nobles, too, were exempt from taxation. Nobles in the wool trade were jealously protective of their sheep pasturage, which wasted lands that could have been used for more productive agricultural development. A ten percent sales tax on all goods, payable every time the goods were resold, discouraged extensive trade. The influx of gold and silver from the Mexican and Peruvian mines caused inflation that drove up prices to three times their pre-colonial levels with no corresponding increase in wages. Despite mercantilist controls, the Spanish suffered trade deficits as they spent more on imported goods than they sold in exports. Philip’s slow and cumbersome government system made tax collection inefficient, allowed for corruption and ineffective allocation of funding to where money was needed. He increased the amount of taxes required of his subjects in Italy and the Netherlands, but this was of little value as the Dutch rebelled and fought a long, bitter war against Philip's rule. Four times during his reign he declared the crown bankrupt. As did Charles, he borrowed millions of ducats for which his creditors, knowing the government to be a credit risk, compelled him to pay high interest rates. At the end of his reign the crown was some 100 million ducats in debt.

The Escorial

In 1560 Philip relocated the Spanish capital from Toledo to the new city of Madrid. He would not, however, live there. In 1563 construction began on a massive palace in the mountains to the north of Madrid. Officially called the “Royal Seat of St. Lawrence,” the palace became known as the “Escorial,” so called for a neighboring town. The Escorial would be more than a royal residence. It would also be a center of both faith and scholarship with a monastery, theological seminary, and a massive chapel rivaling any church in Christendom. For its library, Philip collected the great works of the Renaissance, including works by scholars officially condemned by the Church as heretics. He filled its galleries with works of art, particularly the religious paintings of Raphael, Titian, and El Greco. In regard to Philip’s faith, the most telling feature of the Escorial is the royal mausoleum. Built in a marble and porphyry crypt beneath the altar of the chapel, the mausoleum houses the sarcophagi of Spanish royalty. On Philip’s order, the body of Charles V was re-interred at the Escorial. Philip and all subsequent Spanish monarchs are entombed there. Of all the rooms in the palace, the simplest was Philip’s office. It was a small, undecorated room deep inside the palace with a single window. The view from the window was of the chapel altar. Whenever Philip looked up from his work, he would be reminded of his commitment to the Catholic faith. “The building symbolized Philip’s power; the room expressed his character” (Durant and Durant 279).

Philip’s Foreign Policy

As was mentioned in an earlier reading, Philip was the militant champion of the Catholic Reformation. His foreign policy would use Spanish resources and manpower in support of the Church’s spiritual offensive against Protestantism. He committed thousands of Spanish troops to the suppression of the Calvinist rebellion in the Dutch Netherlands. The Dutch rebellion was by far his most pressing problem and will be considered in a later reading.

In 1569 he actively encouraged and supported a Catholic rebellion led by the Duke of Norfolk against Elizabeth I. In 1572, with the support of the pope, he urged the Catholic leaders of France to end the truce in the religious civil war that had ravaged that country and destroy the Huguenots. The result was the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of thousands of Huguenots in Paris and elsewhere in France. Philip was said to have smiled on hearing the news of the slaughter.

In the 1580s, as Spanish relations with England worsened, Philip encouraged and supported a Jesuit conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth I and put her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, on the English throne. Mary had long been in guarded residence in England, having fled a Calvinist rebellion in Scotland. Elizabeth’s agents foiled the plot and Elizabeth ordered the hapless Mary beheaded in 1587. As Elizabeth had earlier recognized Dutch independence and was providing money and manpower in support of the Dutch, Philip declared war on England in 1587. To this end he assembled a massive fleet of warships, known to history as the Spanish Armada. The “Enterprise of England,” as the Spanish venture was officially called, had the blessing of the pope. (The Spanish Armada will be considered in a later reading.)

Protestantism was not the only spiritual threat. In 1571 Philip joined Pope Pius V and Venice in the formation of a “Holy League” to undertake a crusade against the Ottoman Empire. As the Austrian Habsburgs were perceived as the defenders of Christianity from the advance of Islam, so Spain would assume that role in elsewhere. The Turks were expanding their interests in the Mediterranean and presented a serious threat to Venice. If the Turks were to defeat the Venetians, Philip’s Italian territories would be threatened. In fact, Turkish warships had raided along Spain’s southern coasts. In 1571 a large Spanish fleet, led by Philip’s natural brother, Don Juan, defeated a larger Turkish force at Lepanto off the coast of Greece. Over 45,000 Turks and Christians were killed or drowned. The Battle of Lepanto is seen as significant in that it checked Ottoman power as a strategic factor in the Mediterranean.

On coming to power in 1556, Philip inherited his father’s war with France. This conflict, the last of the “Hapsburg-Valois Wars,” ended with the 1559 Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis. France recognized Spain’s claim to Milan and the Franche-Comté. The peace was solemnized by the marriage of Philip to Princess Elizabeth, daughter of France’s King Henry II. As it began with war with France, Philip’s reign would end with war with France. When the Protestant Henry IV succeeded to the crown of France in 1589, Philip sent troops to France to aid French Catholic forces opposed to Henry. The war proved inconsequential and ended in 1598.

Philip’s Legacy: Spain in Decline

Philip died in 1598 and was succeeded by his 20-year-old son, Philip III. While Spain still remained the most powerful state in Europe, it was no longer the power it had been when Philip succeeded to the throne in 1556. The rebellion of the Netherlands continued to sap Spanish finances and manpower. A state of war existed with England, now a nation on the ascendancy. Protestantism had not been stamped out. Spain’s American empire remained intact, but the Mexican and Peruvian gold and silver mines were producing less. Much of what was being produced was sent on to bankers in Germany and Genoa as debt payments.

Internally, Spain was in severe economic and social difficulty. The Spanish nobility was lapsing into the cynical idleness of luxurious wealth, while the great mass of peasant commoners continued to bear the burdens of taxation and misery. Unable to make a living on the land, thousands of peasants migrated into the cities. The Spanish countryside became increasingly desolate.

Spain had no middle class through which to develop itself as a commercial economy. With Ferdinand and Isabella’s expulsion of the Jews and Moors in 1492, the most vital elements of Spanish trade and manufacturing were gone. The remaining “Christian” Marranos and Moriscos were so heavily taxed under Charles and Philip that they had no motivation to produce. (In 1609 Philip III ordered all Moriscos expelled from Spain, further devastating the Spanish economy.)

On the background of Philip’s last years, Miguel de Cervantes was writing his Don Quixote (its two parts published in 1605 and 1614). The book was more than just the story of an aging idealistic knight futilely intent on reviving true chivalry. It was an allegory for Philip’s Spain. Philip had taken Spain on an idealistic crusade and ended up tilting at windmills. What began in glory ended in disillusion.

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The images in this section are from Wikipedia sources.

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Sources for Philip II

Durant, Will. The Reformation. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957.

Durant, Will and Ariel. The Age of Reason Begins. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961.

Elliott, J. H. Imperial Spain, 1469 – 1716. New York: New American Library, 1966.

Knapton, Earnest. Europe 1450 – 1815. New York: Scribners, 1958.

Langer, William. An Encyclopedia of World History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

Merriman, John. A History of Modern Europe. New York: Norton, 1996.

Palmer, Robert R. et al. A History of the Modern World. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002.